Going “Strategic”: The EU-Japan SPA Five Years On

By Eva Pejsova and Elena Atanassova-Cornelis

1.3.2024

Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute

The EU-Japan Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) signed in 2018 is often portrayed as a milestone in the bilateral relationship. Five years after its conclusion, it is time to look at the progress in pushing forward this partnership to a next, more strategically significant, level. This policy brief focuses on the ‘Peace and Security’ priority cluster in the SPA, tracing the drivers behind the current EU-Japan political-security rapprochement and the key accomplishments achieved under the SPA framework. While structural developments largely explain the dawn of a ‘golden era’1 in EU-Japan relations, this paper argues that the current positive momentum has also been enabled by the changing nature of security threats and the increasingly blurred dividing line between traditional and non-traditional security challenges.

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